WILLIAM GIBSON
ONLY MAGAZINE
8/4/07

ASHER PENN: I had originally wanted to interview you regarding the lonelygirl15 thing last year. Your last book, Pattern Recognition centers around this fictional web-video broadcast, which many people felt paralleled the first serialized show on youtube.

WILLIAM GIBSON: I didn’t think that was that interesting anyway. In a situation like that, with regard to my work as an influence I always assumed that what I have is a predictive talent. Some capacity to imagine what people will do. If I imagine what people do and then people do the thing, I don’t go “Oh they did it because of what I wrote.” They did it cause I knew people would do that shit.

AP: I read somewhere that you had been completely disinterested in the Internet when it began.

WG: I wasn’t interested in it, except, you know, theoretically, until it became “The Web”. As long as there was any learning curve involved... I mean, people forget that before the web template, you had to take lessons, somebody had to teach you how to do it. In the early days, people actually prided themselves on being able to send email messages. I used to say that I’d send email when people’s dogs could send email. Which is now pretty much the case. When I wrote Idoru, I didn’t know what a website was, I’d never seen one. Which was a real advantage for writing Idoru because I didn’t know what they were. The way I write sometimes, less information is better.The people I knew that were actually involved with real computers with what passed for the internet before 1984... they had no imagination with it. They were fixated on these little boxes that you had to sit at and manually program. I found it so boring: it didn’t seem to be the way to imagine this stuff.

AP: Throughout many of your novels you have written about fictional artists, designers and musicians: techo-savvy creatives as opposed to inventor engineers.

WG: When I was doing imaginary fiction, speculative ficition, I had a lot of fun designing things. One of the things that so- called “cyber punk” writers talked about at the very beginning, before they had been labeled that, was “hyper specificity”. I really liked that. The idea that if you’re going to imagine something you have to imagine it more thuroughy than you are going to present it. I‘ve always worked that way. In my head I would have some pretty clear visual image of what a gizmo looked like. As long as I can remember I have been interested in what people now call design. Why people made a specific object. How functionality could be worked into an object or how an object could become uselessly baroque just from adding trim. I don’t know why I never studied it formally, but when I started writing science fiction it really came to the fore. I couldn’t imagine characters, and I couldn’t imagine plots but I could imagine objects. Really my first couple of short stories could read as linear catalogues of objects. You could list the objects. Most of the work for me, the creative pleasure was dreaming up these bits and pieces. Having to do the storyline stuff was like pulling teeth.

AP: One of the things that distinguishes your from the mainstream of science fiction writing is your fixation on the urban setting: you don’t write about intergalactic war at all.

WG: Well one way to look at that is the contrast between reality and glib bullshit, because there’s no such thing as “intergalactic warfare”. There probably never will be. Who knows? Nobody knows about the specifics of that stuff and cyberpunk kind of suspected that. If you read Charlie Stross’s argument that there will be no space travel, never be space colonization, it’s pretty convincing. I was stunned...like what if he was right? That it was all just bullshit? Anyways, I think that I’m pretty much a complete urban lifeform at this point. The distinction between being urban and not being urban has more to do with bandwidth than where you live. Your little kids in Omaha with their bedrooms are totally urban creatures, but there’s no city outside their window.

AP: You also seem to be pretty fixated on the underworld of crime. Have your books ever been inspired by hard-boiled crime fiction? Film noir?

WG: It definitely was but only by osmosis; through a lot of filters. That was such a big flavor in 20th century pop culture that I don’t know what it would take for someone to have missed that. I didn’t have to read it to play those chords. Those are the 3-chord wonders of 20th century pop culture. I think I got my best and most direct hits of crime fiction through Burroughs who was recycling big chunks of Chandeler in Naked Lunch and his other earlier works. Also through Altman’s The Long Goodbye, which is totally post-modern Chander. But influence questions... anybody that knows the answer to influence questions is admitting to a terrible paucity of stuff.

AP: Both pattern recognition and spook country hold strong ties with Russia, as does your early short story “ hinterlands”. When I mentioned this to a friend, she suggested that you grew up with the cold war, and that as a science fiction writer that would stick with you.

WG: Yeah, it really stuck with me. Anybody my age that it didn’t stick with is pretty numb. There is so much richness of what Russia is today. Its fabulous. That long experiment that so many people believed in that ended not with a wimper. And now it’ s become this grotesquely horrible version of what we are. There is no place on earth like any of the cities in Neuromancer... except Russia. The Russian s have become it. It’s the most cyberpunk place on earth. And writing thrillers, Russia is just kind of a wild card its like the bizarro world. I talked to a film director from Khazikistan, and he told me there were four factories in the soviet union that made sunglasses, but you had to get the sunglasses from factory number 3 because the other three factories the lenses were opaque.

AP: In the last decade, you have begun writng in the present day and there hasn’t been any science fiction writers who have taken where you left off in the future, Has science fiction become harder to do?

WG: When I started writing science fiction. I already knew that it was never about the future: Its about the moment in which it’s written. Nothing gets quainter faster than a piece of fiction set in an imaginary future. That’s really part of its charm. As the days go on, the fork widens and the flying cars become less likely... But it was never about that. The only way to read science fiction that made any sense to me was to make it about the period in which it was written. 1984 is a bout 1948. Orwell didn’t have to make anything up. He had Hitler he had Stalin. Something like the Puppet Master is the United States under McCarthy. Lord of the Rings is the Anglican church on crack. That’s how I read that stuff. I never thought it was about the future. I never thought I had any predicting function. The world of Neuromancer was my take on where Reaganomics would go if you let it. The United States with no middle class. The United States turned into Mexico City. I never worried about what was going to happen. What I worried about more was seeing what I could do to engineer a longer sell-by-date into the narrative. Not because I thought the narrative would have a long shelf life, just because I thought it was a n interesting game. Some people are arguing these days that science fiction is a historical entity now. It belonged to the period between the 19th century and the 20th. There is a character in pattern recognition who argues that you can’t project the future without a present that’s sufficiently stable: wide enough to stand on. Maybe that’s now.